The truth about doublespeak: Is it lying or just being persuasive? – Phys.org
Doublespeak, or the use of euphemisms to sway opinion, lets leaders avoid the reputational costs of lying while still bringing people around to their way of thinking, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that the use of agreeable euphemistic terms biases people’s evaluations of actions to be more favourable. For example, replacing a disagreeable term, “torture,” with something more innocuous and semantically agreeable, like “enhanced interrogation.”
“Like the much-studied…
